which we are now suffering." It was, perhaps, in
reaction against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastful
announcements of his righteousness. "Rousseau feels himself so good that
he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the Almighty at the sound of
the trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of his _Confessions_ in his
hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, 'Let a
single one assert to Thee if he dare: "I am better than that man."'"
Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt
thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of
life: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of
decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility.
Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting "No."
Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling.
At the same time, Professor Babbitt does not offer us as a cure for our
troubles the decorum of the Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid
us obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit. He wishes our men of
letters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks. "True
classicism," he observes, "does not rest on the observance of rules or the
imitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal." The
romanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the great
writers, but mere wonder. He takes Poe as a typical romanticist. "It is
not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atom
of awe or reverence. On the other hand, he both experiences wonder and
seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith."

One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists
unduly praise the ignorant--the savage, the peasant, and the child.
Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six
as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us,
praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom
from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush
of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He
begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character.
He tries all sorts of false gods--nature-worship, art-worship,
humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of
these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation
of the